“Here you go.” Rex Stowe pulled one out of a pack.

“Thanks.” Armstrong lit up and sucked in smoke. He was named for George Armstrong Custer; his father had been born in the same little Ohio town as the hero of the Second Mexican War and the Great War. Armstrong was born in Washington, D.C., where Merle Grimes settled down and married after a war wound from which he still limped. He’d had a comfortable postwar career as a minor government functionary. He and the rest of the family probably weren’t comfortable now. Washington was too close to the border with the CSA to be safe, though as far as Armstrong knew his father and mother and younger sister were well.

A middle-aged woman and a couple of little kids stood in the rubble by the side of the track and watched the U.S. soldiers go by. Silent hatred burned in their eyes. Of itself, Armstrong’s Springfield swung a couple of inches toward them. Plenty of Mormon women fought alongside their husbands and brothers and sons. Plenty of kids threw homemade grenades and firebombs-Featherston Fizzes, people called them. You never could tell, even with people behind the lines.

“They don’t like it that you’re smoking,” Stowe said.

No mere cigarette could have made them look like that. They wished him straight to hell. If they’d had weapons, they would have done their best to send him there.

Every civilian he saw looked at him like that. He knew there were people in Utah who weren’t Mormons. The Mormon majority called anybody who wasn’t one of them a gentile. Even Jews were gentiles here. One of Armstrong’s buddies was a New York City guy named Yossel Reisen. He thought that was funny as the devil.

But a lot of the so-called gentiles had joined their Mormon neighbors in rising up against the USA. Armstrong had trouble figuring that out. What had the U.S. government ever done to them? Had they hated the way Utah was treated so much that they wanted to leave the USA? Weren’t they a little crazy, or more than a little, if they had? Yeah, the rebels were brave, no doubt about it. But bravery had only so much to do with anything when it ran up against superior firepower.